MathJax

28 September 2012

Monassis release 1.0.8 (codename: nostalgia)

I just noticed that it's 1 year ago to the day that the first version of Monassis went live. It was version 0.1, which had 6 templates and supported only numeric and multiple choice responses. We now have more than 650 templates and can interpret chemical compounds, equations and spectroscopic notation, multiple choice, coordinates, mathematical expressions, equations and inequalities, factorised and expanded polynomials, proper fractions, decimal numbers, intervals and lists!

The main purpose of the v0.1 release was to have Grant Hillebrand's class try out the system and give some feedback on how to improve it. The practice service has come a long way since then thanks to a great templating team and some very strong support and great feedback from school teachers and learners.

To celebrate the occasion there's a small release going out today. (Ok, that's not entirely causal. I was actually preparing this release and then noticed that v0.1 went out on 28 September 2011.)

In this release:
  • Implemented equation responses
  • Better error reporting.
  • Support for logarithms with non-default base using underscore notation.
    Some more prep for releasing on mobile and Mxit.

11 September 2012

Monassis release 1.0.7

This is a minor release and mostly a collection of fixes (listed below). The exciting bit is that some of the modifications are in preparation for releasing the practice service over mobile phones... but, you'll have to wait a few more weeks for detailed news on that front.

  • New features:
    • Each chapter in dashboard is now a link, filtering on that chapter only
    • Implemented coordinate response type
  • Fixes:
    • Minor fixes to ASCIIsvg to PNG converter (Thanks Leen!)
    • Do not show "future chapters" section on dashboard when there are no more future chapters. (We finally need this since the Physical Sciences Grade 12 book has been fully templated!)
    • Fixed list response type so that it can have sub-types that use semi-colons
    • Implemented separate sessions for each book. You can now practice maths and science simultaneously without confusing the practice service.
  • Mobi prep:
    • Check for Mxit in request headers
    • Added spans and divs around dynamic elements in dashboard and question views
    • Implemented per-book access control